Etch->Lenny upgrade mutes some/many old laptops.

["Joona Kiiski" <joona.kiiski@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I decided to give lenny a try and upgraded my old laptop.
Everything went fine, except for some strange reason, sound didn't work.

After about three hours of trial and error plus some googling, I found
bug #464191 which is caused by removal of some binary-only driver from
kernel.

While in principle I agree with the idea of avoiding all binary-only
stuff, this change is going to cause much trouble for hundreds
(thousands?) of upgraders and give debian some more "hard to use" and
"not beginner friendly" reputation.

But if you devs are so fanatic that you really can't live with some
ten years old binary-only drivers in kernel (I doubt anyone is
interested in writing open source replacement!), the least you can do
is document this well in release notes and package those drivers in
non-free/unofficial.

--
Joona Kiiski